Flamenco in Taipei
Lian is a young woman who lives in Taipei, Taiwan. She dances flamenco and dreams about Spain. To her, Spain is the place of freedom, the place were she can be ”herself”. I met Lian in Taipei and travelled with her to Mazu, a little island close to the cost of mainland China.
She danced, we talked, I filmed.
The video is about an unusually strong woman who manages to visualize her dreams, despite a hard everyday life and the expectations from the society on how a woman is supposed to make her choices. What interested me, as a European, is the aspect of exoticism and romanticism towards such other cultures an how it works both ways. What is exotic? Who is exotizing whom?

Sign-language and a horrible song about Skeletons and Vampires performed by sweet children

Practical Chinesevideo 1min

The chinese world shi shi translated into English.

A lesson in Finnish grammar
video 1 min

Childrens rhymes for learning Finnish grammar

Talk about dreamsvideo 8 min 1999

Talk about dreams video 8 min 1999
Three young men, professional actors, were given one story each to tell the others. The shooting took place in a restaurant in Malmö. The actors were not allowed to hear the other stories beforehand and they were instructed to react on what they heard. The stories they were given to perform and to transform into their own were all dreams that I have had. The actors didn´t know this, and it wasn´t obvious that the stories were dreams; they were only so weird or so normal that they could almost have happened in real life.

The Treasurevideoinstallation 1998

Two young women ran away from home and hitch-hiked to Christiania, Copenhagen. They met four young men and together with them they decided to break in to a jewellery´s. The alarm went off. The girls escaped with the gold. They didn´t know what to do with the loot, so they burried it in Christiania. It is probably still to be found there. Nobody knows what happened to the other girl. A true story told by one of the girls.

Four o´clock in the morning
1 min 35 mm film Art at The Movies, /SF Culture Capital of Stockholm 1998

A story about neighbours, and the fact that we interact with each others´ lives, whether we want it or not. The story is told through a song about a night in Malmö, when suddenly a young girl´s voice echoed between the houses: Mummy Mummy I don´t want to die yet!!! All the neighbours woke up. Someone had already called the police.

Mikaelas voice
video 11 min 1997

Mikaela, 18 years old, is telling us stories and memories from her own life. Her voice is clear but the image on the screen is blurred. After a while it becomes clear why the picture is so difficult to discern: Mikaela is blind.